How to make my website faster

A faster website is a better website. When you are able to optimize your pages so that the load speed is more considerable, you have the ability to attract more customers, reduce bounce rates, and improve your conversion percentage.

As soon as customers visit your website, they expect pages and images to load. If there are any problems that prevent everything from loading quickly, they are going to use the back button, and this is going to have a negative impact on your bounce rate. You want to keep customers on your website for several minutes. You want them to explore various webpages. If the pages take too long to load, you will not be able to achieve this goal and your customers are going to go somewhere else, which means that they will not become your customers.

A poor bounce rate is also going to have a negative impact on your search engine optimization. This means that it will be harder to appear in the top pages of Google, Bing, or any other search that consumers make. This can lead to a significant amount of frustration because you are losing out on money.

Your focus needs to be how to make your website faster. As soon as you can answer this question, you are going to learn for yourself that a faster website is a better website. You will be able to lower your bounce rate and increase your conversion rates, which will lead to more sales – all because you learn how to increase the speed that pages load.

What You’re Likely Noticing

When you are struggling with making your website faster, you likely have everything else that you should in place. You know about your industry, your target demographic, and you are creative. You have a great looking website and your hard work has paid off so far. The only problem is that once people get to your website, you are unable to convert them.

Your conversion rate is based upon how many site visitors you have versus how many are turning into customers. If you are noticing a conversion rate of less than 1%, you have serious problems. Conversion rates are going to vary from industry to industry as well as the device that people are using. You will notice smaller conversion rates on smart phones than on tablets, and less on tablets than you would on laptops or desktops. That being said, you still need a relatively high conversion rate in order to enhance your bottom line.

If your conversion rate is in there, but everything else is, it likely has to do with the speed that your website pages are loading.

Why Load Speed Matters

A few years ago, Google announced that page speed was a ranking factor. This means that when Google determines where you are going to be ranked amongst all of the other businesses that are using the same keywords as you, the speed in which your pages load are going to help you, or work against you. This means that site speed should also be a priority of yours.

Slow sites are going to:

– Decrease customer satisfaction

– Decrease conversions

– Negatively impact your SEO

It is important to look at how quickly your site loads. Does it load in five seconds? Three seconds? Less than a second? These are questions that you need to be able to answer. If you have no idea how quickly your site loads, you could be in serious trouble already.

The average website is going to load in under two seconds. If yours takes longer than this, it is likely that people are going to notice, and hit the back button so that they can go to a site that appreciates their customer’s time.

Load speed is not just important for Google. It is also important for customers. Achieving a fast load speed will allow you to get the better ranking within the search engines can keep your customers happy. When your customers stay on your website longer, they are going to learn more about you, be more interested in what you have to offer, and convert themselves from site visitors to customers. This allows you to contribute more to the bottom line.

You may not always be able to compete with the other websites that are out there in terms of search engine optimization. They are spending thousands of dollars every month in article and press release generation and within PPC marketing to stay where they are at. However, if you can generate a faster website than they can, it can improve your visibility within the search engines, and even give users a reason to choose your website over the competition’s.

Measuring Your Page Speed

Do you really have any idea how fast your website is? You may think that it is relatively fast, but if you are not getting the appropriate site conversion rate, there may be more problems than you think. This is when you need to take matters into your own hands and begin exploring your page speed. This will allow you to identify problems and begin working on ways to improve the page speed so that you can improve the other components of your business.

There are various tools that you can use online that will measure your page speed for you, including PageSpeed by Google. You will enter your URL or any other URL into the field and let a remote server do some analysis. You will learn about the performance and give you an indication of how well your site is organized and optimized.

It is important to remember that some of the page speed tools will provide you with a percentage that tells you how well your site is optimized. However, if you have large graphics, but it is well organized, you may get a high ranking, even though there are chunks of graphics that need to load, thereby slowing your page down. This means you need to be careful about accepting a percentage to be a good thing. You need to look at the page speed in seconds because this is how your site visitors are going to look at your page.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how organized your website is. Site visitors don’t care about how many megabytes of text you have, how many megabytes your photos are, or whether you have a good structure to your website. They don’t care about the coding, the CSS, or anything else. They look at how long they have to wait for your website to load. If they have to wait longer than they have to wait on other websites, they are going to take notice and leave your website for one that is better. Once you lose a site visitor this way, they are likely going to remember and not return. This is going to have a negative impact on your ability to promote your website and ultimately your business.

What Can You Do?

There are a variety of ways for you to increase site speed. When you can make your site faster, you enhance the user experience – and this will get rid of your poor bounce rate and help to convert more. Site visitors into customers – and this can have a dramatic improvement to your bottom line because you’ll see an increase in sales.

Some of the top things you can do to increase site speed include:

– Combine CSS into a single external file and link it to the head section of every page instead of loading it into the HTML of your pages.

– Minimize the HTTP requests so that your pages will load faster and reduce the number of items to be loaded.

– Use CSS sprites at every chance that you have, which will minimize HTTP requests.

– Compress your images to make sure that they are of a smaller file size. There are various apps that will compress your images or you can click “save for Web” when using Photoshop instead of the standard “save”.

– Utilize server-side caching so that static content on websites do not need to load every single time.

– Use a content delivery network, or CDN to make it possible for users to download information in parallel.

– Reduce the number of 301 redirects whenever possible.

Whether you have a WordPress site or any other site, you need to make sure that the optimization is present. You can determine whether you want a fast website or an even faster website. It may be possible to reduce load time by 70%, and that is going to enhance user experiences considerably. Your website may become the go to website within your industry because people know that they can get in and get out quickly.

It may be time that you start working with a graphic designer so that you can get helpful hints with your logo design, graphics, and everything else. If you are using photos and videos that are simply too large, it is going to take too much time for them to load – and people will lose interest in your website long before they have had a chance to load entirely.

A good website design goes beyond aesthetics. It has to do with how well is organized, designed, and how quickly it loads. There are some website designers that simply don’t know how to organize code in such a way that the pages load quickly, and this will be to your detriment.

Every second counts. You will find that people will abandon a website quickly when they have to wait. The longer they have to wait, the higher the page, abandonment percentage increases. It is important to remember that the average website user lacks patience and therefore making them wait too long, is going to be a problem for your site conversion goals.

It is also important to remember that more people are using smart phones and tablets to access the Internet. They do not have the same bandwidth and they do not have the same level of processors, which means that information will take longer to load on a mobile device. It is one reason why every marketing company will suggest that you optimize your website for mobile devices.

You may think that you have done everything, or done everything correctly. Site conversions are ultimately what is going to keep you in business. You can have the best looking website and the best looking product, but if people aren’t able to load your pages in a timely manner, they are not going to convert from visitor to customer.

If you are unsure about how to combine CSS, how to minimize HTTP requests, or how to implement all of the other suggestions, it can be advantageous to work with a company. This will help to create a list of actionable items that will help to speed up your website and give you the edge over the competition that you have been looking for once and for all.

There is no reason that you have to do everything on your own. When you have a website, there may be megabytes and megabytes of text and graphics that need to load before a site visitor has any idea what is going on within your website. If you have looked at the code and you think you have done everything and yet your site still loads slowly, it is time that you take action and take control of your web business.

Hosting Matters

As you have noticed, there are many things that go into the speed of a website. CSS or stylesheets need to be compressed, JavaScript files need to be compressed, the site needs to be cached, text files and images need to be compressed and optimized, request need to be minimized, and the list goes on and on.

As you make changes behind the scenes, you may also notice that your hosting provider is incapable of providing you with the speed that you need. Some hosts are simply ill-equipped for the amount of traffic that your site generates. If you have multiple people visiting your site at the same time, your host may simply shut down and this will cause extremely slow load times and potentially prevent people from accessing the website at all.

In some instances, you may need to change a hosting provider. This means changing out who you pay your host fees to as well as who will be hosting your website on the Internet. By changing providers, you may notice a considerable difference simply because they are able to promote your domain in a more effective way.

What You Will Notice

When you can increase the speed of your website, there are going to be several things that you notice almost immediately. Your pages will load faster and this will equal a greater user experience. When your users enjoy the experience of working with your website, there is going to be a higher level of customer satisfaction. Higher customer satisfaction means higher sales, which will convert into more customers. They are likely going to spend more money when they can get through your website faster, and this puts more money into your pocket.

In today’s economy, you cannot afford to suffer from a slow loading website. Consumers don’t have a lot of time and they want to be able to go through a website quickly in order to do what they need to do. If you are slowing them down, they are going to find another website and you miss out on that potential business.

When you can demonstrate that you respect people’s time, they are going to reward you by shopping on your site. They may even buy more from you because you have enhanced the user experience and this will improve your bottom line. When you are in business, your goal beyond anything else is to improve your bottom line. You may not think that site speed is going to be dramatic, but the research is already in place.

Some research has shown that when a load goes from one second for seconds, conversions will decline. Additionally, every one second of improvement that you can make on your site may be able to result in a 2% conversion increase. This means you may have the ability to increase your conversion by 4% or more. How much faster is your site than the others within your industry? You may want to start making some comparisons to see how fast the competition’s websites are in comparison to your own so you can determine just how quickly you need to make your pages.

Ultimately, purchasing an optimization package will reduce load time and increase the speed of your website and this can pay for itself. You will be able to enhance the user experience and make improvements to your bottom line so that you can stop struggling with your online business.